10 WordPress Tips for Beginners

Jun 14

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If you are new to WordPress, here are 10 tips for beginners.

1. PERMALINKS

Permalinks refer to URLs that go to your webpages. Precisely speaking, these permalinks will show how your posts display in the search results. You can set them up under the WordPress settings. You will see that your URL appears with a number. That is the default and not very good for SEO. So,you choose Custom structure or Post Title. Now, your permalink consists of your post name which can be easily searched for on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Remember to not stuff your URL with keywords. Make smart use of keywords by eliminating any unnecessary ones. Make sure that when you finalize a permalink, it is pleasant enough for a human being. Forget about the search engines and always write permalinks for humans!

2. Themes

WordPress themes are website templates basically. They contain the tools required to customize your blog. You should give plenty of thought to your WP theme. WordPress has a variety of themes and all of them can be customized if you know a little PHP and HTML.

3. Title Tags and Description Tags

There are several SEO plugins available for WordPress. WordPress SEO by Yoast will help you write title tags and meta descriptions properly. Don’t forget, when you write title tags and meta descriptions, you want to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. Always practice good SEO and adhere to Google guidelines.

4. The Text Editor or Kitchen Sink ( From WordPress.com )

The visual editor provides a semi-WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) content editor that allows you to easily create, edit, and format your blog content in a view similar to that of a word processor.

This is the default editing mode of WordPress.com, but if it does not appear to be enabled, you can select the Visual tab in the top right corner of the editor area, as depicted below.

There are two (2) rows of editing icons contained within the visual editor. You can find out what any icon means or does by hovering over it with your mouse – a small tooltip will appear describing the icon and its purpose.

5. Plugins

Plugins increase the functionality of WordPress.

WordPress has plugins that can do pretty much everything and this makes WordPress simply amazing. But do not just start downloading plugins randomly. For now, just install the essential ones or the basics. You can get Akismet installed, but you need to get it activated. For this, you will need a Akismet key. This is aimed at reducing spam to its minimum. The latter is important, too. It is for the SEO which enables the search engines to find your blogs easily. I consider these WordPress plugins to be a requirement: WordPress SEO by Yoast and JetPack.

6. Make a Post Sticky

If you want some of your blog posts to be on top of all the posts, you can have it done on the spot. The date of the article would not matter anymore. How to make posts sticky? On your ‘Edit Posts’ page, you can see a ‘Visibility’ section. Click the ‘Edit’ link and then tick the ‘Stick this post to the front page’. Click ‘OK’ and you are done! There is another way to do this as well: Posts >> All posts >> Quick Edit Next, tick ‘Make this post sticky’ and click ‘Next’ afterwards. You can have a sticky post.

7. Your Browser

At times, you may make some changes to your website, but you may not be able to see them. Do not panic! You only need to clear your browser cache and you will get this problem solved. In order to clear it, you have to press the SHIFT key and hold onto it while you click the ‘refresh’ button in your browser. Your browser cache is cleared and you can see the changes you made to your site.

8. Footers

At the bottom of your WordPress site, you can notice a footer area. It is very rare that people notice it, but it plays an important part in keeping your readers and visitors engaged. This sometimes-forgotten-footer area allows you to add information about the owner of the website, any copyright message or maybe a link to some page. You can use premium themes to expand this area and then, you can give more information via this. You can add-on a short biography or an opt-in to your email list, etc.. Remember that some people actually scroll down to have a glance of all such information and if your are really interested in getting people to visit your site more frequently, then you should make full use of this section.

9. WordPress Security is Crucial

WordPress is a great, user friendly content management system and as long as you take the necessary security precautions, you should be OK. If you don’t take security seriously and you have a website with high visibility on the web, chances are good you will have issues. With that said and out of the way, there are several good plugins that will help you in locking hackers out of your site. WordFence Security is the security solution that is being used on this site. It’s free (there is a paid version with more options) and works really good. In addition to having a firewall, renaming the WordPress login page or wp-login.php to something other than wp-login.php will prevent most brute force attacks and bots from playing password guessing games. Please remember, your WordPress site is not secure until you secure it.

10. Analytic Data & Tracking

You must have heard this: “If you cannot measure it then you cannot manage it.” Track your visitors to improve your site. You can do it by using Jetpack stats and Google Analytics. The former is available only to free WordPress blog users. However, the self hosted WordPress users can benefit from the former as well as get the latter installed for further advantages. Google Analytics will also allow you to filter out your own visits which is indeed a must. There must many things lacking in this article. We have tried our best to help the WordPress beginners.

10 WordPress Tips for Beginners was last modified: September 9th, 2018 by Jeff